Tender is the Night
- -
- 100%
- +
The trouble began at the time Earl Brady’s car passed the Divers’ car stopped on the road—Abe’s account melted impersonally into the thronged night—Violet McKisco was telling Mrs. Abrams something she had found out about the Divers—she had gone upstairs in their house and she had come upon something there which had made a great impression on her. But Tommy is a watch-dog about the Divers. As a matter of fact she is inspiring and formidable—but it’s a mutual thing, and the fact of The Divers together is more important to their friends than many of them realize. Of course it’s done at a certain sacrifice—sometimes they seem just rather charming figures in a ballet, and worth just the attention you give a ballet, but it’s more than that—you’d have to know the story. Anyhow Tommy is one of those men that Dick’s passed along to Nicole and when Mrs. McKisco kept hinting at her story, he called them on it. He said:
“Mrs. McKisco, please don’t talk further about Mrs. Diver.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” she objected.
“I think it’s better to leave them out.”
“Are they so sacred?”
“Leave them out. Talk about something else.”
He was sitting on one of the two little seats beside Campion. Campion told me the story.
“Well, you’re pretty high-handed,” Violet came back.
You know how conversations are in cars late at night, some people murmuring and some not caring, giving up after the party, or bored or asleep. Well, none of them knew just what happened until the car stopped and Barban cried in a voice that shook everybody, a voice for cavalry.
“Do you want to step out here—we’re only a mile from the hotel and you can walk it or I’ll drag you there. You’ve got to shut up and shut your wife up!”
“You’re a bully,” said McKisco. “You know you’re stronger muscularly than I am. But I’m not afraid of you—what they ought to have is the code duello—”
There’s where he made his mistake because Tommy, being French, leaned over and clapped him one, and then the chauffeur drove on. That was where you passed them. Then the women began. That was still the state of things when the car got to the hotel.
Tommy telephoned some man in Cannes to act as second and McKisco said he wasn’t going to be seconded by Campion, who wasn’t crazy for the job anyhow, so he telephoned me not to say anything but to come right down. Violet McKisco collapsed and Mrs. Abrams took her to her room and gave her a bromide whereupon she fell comfortably asleep on the bed. When I got there I tried to argue with Tommy but the latter wouldn’t accept anything short of an apology and McKisco rather spunkily wouldn’t give it.
When Abe had finished Rosemary asked thoughtfully:
“Do the Divers know it was about them?”
“No—and they’re not ever going to know they had anything to do with it. That damn Campion had no business talking to you about it, but since he did—I told the chauffeur I’d get out the old musical saw if he opened his mouth about it. This fight’s between two men—what Tommy needs is a good war.”
“I hope the Divers don’t find out,” Rosemary said.
Abe peered at his watch.
“I’ve got to go up and see McKisco—do you want to come?—he feels sort of friendless—I bet he hasn’t slept.”
Rosemary had a vision of the desperate vigil that high-strung, badly organized man had probably kept. After a moment balanced between pity and repugnance she agreed, and full of morning energy, bounced upstairs beside Abe.
McKisco was sitting on his bed with his alcoholic combativeness vanished, in spite of the glass of champagne in his hand. He seemed very puny and cross and white. Evidently he had been writing and drinking all night. He stared confusedly at Abe and Rosemary and asked:
“Is it time?”
“No, not for half an hour.”
The table was covered with papers which he assembled with some difficulty into a long letter; the writing on the last pages was very large and illegible. In the delicate light of electric lamps fading, he scrawled his name at the bottom, crammed it into an envelope and handed it to Abe. “For my wife.”
“You better souse your head in cold water,” Abe suggested.
“You think I’d better?” inquired McKisco doubtfully. “I don’t want to get too sober.”
“Well, you look terrible now.”
Obediently McKisco went into the bathroom.
“I’m leaving everything in an awful mess,” he called. “I don’t know how Violet will get back to America. I don’t carry any insurance. I never got around to it.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, you’ll be right here eating breakfast in an hour.”
“Sure, I know.” He came back with his hair wet and looked at Rosemary as if he saw her for the first time. Suddenly tears stood in his eyes. “I never have finished my novel. That’s what makes me so sore. You don’t like me,” he said to Rosemary, “but that can’t be helped. I’m primarily a literary man.” He made a vague discouraged sound and shook his head helplessly. “I’ve made lots of mistakes in my life—many of them. But I’ve been one of the most prominent—in some ways—”
He gave this up and puffed at a dead cigarette.
“I do like you,” said Rosemary, “but I don’t think you ought to fight a duel.”
“Yeah, I should have tried to beat him up, but it’s done now. I’ve let myself be drawn into something that I had no right to be. I have a very violent temper—” He looked closely at Abe as if he expected the statement to be challenged. Then with an aghast laugh he raised the cold cigarette butt toward his mouth. His breathing quickened.
“The trouble was I suggested the duel—if Violet had only kept her mouth shut I could have fixed it. Of course even now I can just leave, or sit back and laugh at the whole thing—but I don’t think Violet would ever respect me again.”
“Yes, she would,” said Rosemary. “She’d respect you more.”
“No—you don’t know Violet. She’s very hard when she gets an advantage over you. We’ve been married twelve years, we had a little girl seven years old and she died and after that you know how it is. We both played around on the side a little, nothing serious but drifting apart—she called me a coward out there tonight.”
Troubled, Rosemary didn’t answer.
“Well, we’ll see there’s as little damage done as possible,” said Abe. He opened the leather case. “These are Barban’s duelling pistols—I borrowed them so you could get familiar with them. He carries them in his suitcase.” He weighed one of the archaic weapons in his hand. Rosemary gave an exclamation of uneasiness and McKisco looked at the pistols anxiously.
“Well—it isn’t as if we were going to stand up and pot each other with forty-fives,” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Abe cruelly; “the idea is you can sight better along a long barrel.”
“How about distance?” asked McKisco.
“I’ve inquired about that. If one or the other parties has to be definitely eliminated they make it eight paces, if they’re just good and sore it’s twenty paces, and if it’s only to vindicate their honor it’s forty paces. His second agreed with me to make it forty.”
“That’s good.”
“There’s a wonderful duel in a novel of Pushkin’s,” recollected Abe. “Each man stood on the edge of a precipice, so if he was hit at all he was done for.”
This seemed very remote and academic to McKisco, who stared at him and said, “What?”
“Do you want to take a quick dip and freshen up?”
“No—no, I couldn’t swim.” He sighed. “I don’t see what it’s all about,” he said helplessly. “I don’t see why I’m doing it.”
It was the first thing he had ever done in his life. Actually he was one of those for whom the sensual world does not exist, and faced with a concrete fact he brought to it a vast surprise.
“We might as well be going,” said Abe, seeing him fail a little.
“All right.” He drank off a stiff drink of brandy, put the flask in his pocket, and said with almost a savage air: “What’ll happen if I kill him—will they throw me in jail?”
“I’ll run you over the Italian border.”
He glanced at Rosemary—and then said apologetically to Abe:
“Before we start there’s one thing I’d like to see you about alone.”
“I hope neither of you gets hurt,” Rosemary said. “I think it’s very foolish and you ought to try to stop it.”
CHAPTER 11
She found Campion downstairs in the deserted lobby.
“I saw you go upstairs,” he said excitedly. “Is he all right? When is the duel going to be?”
“I don’t know.” She resented his speaking of it as a circus, with McKisco as the tragic clown.
“Will you go with me?” he demanded, with the air of having seats. “I’ve hired the hotel car.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“Why not? I imagine it’ll take years off my life but I wouldn’t miss it for worlds. We could watch it from quite far away.”
“Why don’t you get Mr. Dumphry to go with you?”
His monocle fell out, with no whiskers to hide in—he drew himself up.
“I never want to see him again.”
“Well, I’m afraid I can’t go. Mother wouldn’t like it.”
As Rosemary entered her room Mrs. Speers stirred sleepily and called to her:
“Where’ve you been?”
“I just couldn’t sleep. You go back to sleep, Mother.”
“Come in my room.” Hearing her sit up in bed, Rosemary went in and told her what had happened.
“Why don’t you go and see it?” Mrs. Speers suggested. “You needn’t go up close and you might be able to help afterwards.”
Rosemary did not like the picture of herself looking on and she demurred, but Mrs. Speer’s consciousness was still clogged with sleep and she was reminded of night calls to death and calamity when she was the wife of a doctor. “I like you to go places and do things on your own initiative without me—you did much harder things for Rainy’s publicity stunts.”
Still Rosemary did not see why she should go, but she obeyed the sure, clear voice that had sent her into the stage entrance of the Odeon in Paris when she was twelve and greeted her when she came out again.
She thought she was reprieved when from the steps she saw Abe and McKisco drive away—but after a moment the hotel car came around the corner. Squealing delightedly Luis Campion pulled her in beside him.
“I hid there because they might not let us come. I’ve got my movie camera, you see.”
She laughed helplessly. He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.
“I wonder why Mrs. McKisco didn’t like the Divers?” she said. “They were very nice to her.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that. It was something she saw. We never did find exactly what it was because of Barban.”
“Then that wasn’t what made you so sad.”
“Oh, no,” he said, his voice breaking, “that was something else that happened when we got back to the hotel. But now I don’t care—I wash my hands of it completely.”
They followed the other car east along the shore past Juan les Pins, where the skeleton of the new Casino was rising. It was past four and under a blue-gray sky the first fishing boats were creaking out into a glaucous sea. Then they turned off the main road and into the back country.
“It’s the golf course,” cried Campion, “I’m sure that’s where it’s going to be.”
He was right. When Abe’s car pulled up ahead of them the east was crayoned red and yellow, promising a sultry day. Ordering the hotel car into a grove of pines Rosemary and Campion kept in the shadow of a wood and skirted the bleached fairway where Abe and McKisco were walking up and down, the latter raising his head at intervals like a rabbit scenting. Presently there were moving figures over by a farther tee and the watchers made out Barban and his French second—the latter carried the box of pistols under his arm.
Somewhat appalled, McKisco slipped behind Abe and took a long swallow of brandy. He walked on choking and would have marched directly up into the other party, but Abe stopped him and went forward to talk to the Frenchman. The sun was over the horizon.
Campion grabbed Rosemary’s arm.
“I can’t stand it,” he squeaked, almost voiceless. “It’s too much. This will cost me—”
“Let go,” Rosemary said peremptorily. She breathed a frantic prayer in French.
The principals faced each other, Barban with the sleeve rolled up from his arm. His eyes gleamed restlessly in the sun, but his motion was deliberate as he wiped his palm on the seam of his trousers. McKisco, reckless with brandy, pursed his lips in a whistle and pointed his long nose about nonchalantly, until Abe stepped forward with a handkerchief in his hand. The French second stood with his face turned away. Rosemary caught her breath in terrible pity and gritted her teeth with hatred for Barban; then:
“One—two—three!” Abe counted in a strained voice.
They fired at the same moment. McKisco swayed but recovered himself. Both shots had missed.
“Now, that’s enough!” cried Abe.
The duellists walked in, and everyone looked at Barban inquiringly.
“I declare myself unsatisfied.”
“What? Sure you’re satisfied,” said Abe impatiently. “You just don’t know it.”
“Your man refuses another shot?”
“You’re damn right, Tommy. You insisted on this and my client went through with it.”
Tommy laughed scornfully.
“The distance was ridiculous,” he said. “I’m not accustomed to such farces—your man must remember he’s not now in America.”
“No use cracking at America,” said Abe rather sharply. And then, in a more conciliatory tone, “This has gone far enough, Tommy.” They parleyed briskly for a moment—then Barban nodded and bowed coldly to his late antagonist.
“No shake hand?” suggested the French doctor.
“They already know each other,” said Abe.
He turned to McKisco.
“Come on, let’s get out.”
As they strode off, McKisco, in exultation, gripped his arm.
“Wait a minute!” Abe said. “Tommy wants his pistol back. He might need it again.”
McKisco handed it over.
“To hell with him,” he said in a tough voice. “Tell him he can—”
“Shall I tell him you want another shot?”
“Well, I did it,” cried McKisco, as they went along. “And I did it pretty well, didn’t I? I wasn’t yellow.”
“You were pretty drunk,” said Abe bluntly.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“All right, then, you weren’t.”
“Why would it make any difference if I had a drink or so?”
As his confidence mounted he looked resentfully at Abe.
“What difference does that make?” he repeated.
“If you can’t see it, there’s no use going into it.”
“Don’t you know everybody was drunk all the time during the war?”
“Well, let’s forget it.”
But the episode was not quite over. There were urgent footsteps in the heather behind them and the doctor drew up alongside.
“Pardon, Messieurs,” he panted. “Voulez-vous regler mes honorairies? Naturellement c’est pour soins médicaux seulement. M. Barban n’a qu’un billet de mille et ne peut pas les régler et l’autre a laissé son porte-monnaie chez lui.”
“Trust a Frenchman to think of that,” said Abe, and then to the doctor. “Combien?”
“Let me pay this,” said McKisco.
“No, I’ve got it. We were all in about the same danger.”
Abe paid the doctor while McKisco suddenly turned into the bushes and was sick there. Then paler than before he strutted on with Abe toward the car through the now rosy morning.
Campion lay gasping on his back in the shrubbery, the only casualty of the duel, while Rosemary suddenly hysterical with laughter kept kicking at him with her espadrille. She did this persistently until she roused him—the only matter of importance to her now was that in a few hours she would see the person whom she still referred to in her mind as “the Divers” on the beach.
CHAPTER 12
They were at Voisins waiting for Nicole, six of them, Rosemary, the Norths, Dick Diver and two young French musicians. They were looking over the other patrons of the restaurant to see if they had repose—Dick said no American men had any repose, except himself, and they were seeking an example to confront him with. Things looked black for them—not a man had come into the restaurant for ten minutes without raising his hand to his face.
“We ought never to have given up waxed mustaches,” said Abe. “Nevertheless Dick isn’t the only man with repose—”
“Oh, yes, I am.”
“—but he may be the only sober man with repose.”
A well-dressed American had come in with two women who swooped and fluttered unselfconsciously around a table. Suddenly, he perceived that he was being watched—whereupon his hand rose spasmodically and arranged a phantom bulge in his necktie. In another unseated party a man endlessly patted his shaven cheek with his palm, and his companion mechanically raised and lowered the stub of a cold cigar. The luckier ones fingered eyeglasses and facial hair, the unequipped stroked blank mouths, or even pulled desperately at the lobes of their ears.
A well-known general came in, and Abe, counting on the man’s first year at West Point—that year during which no cadet can resign and from which none ever recovers—made a bet with Dick of five dollars.
His hands hanging naturally at his sides, the general waited to be seated. Once his arms swung suddenly backward like a jumper’s and Dick said, “Ah!” supposing he had lost control, but the general recovered and they breathed again—the agony was nearly over, the garçon was pulling out his chair …
With a touch of fury the conqueror shot up his hand and scratched his gray immaculate head.
“You see,” said Dick smugly, “I’m the only one.”
Rosemary was quite sure of it and Dick, realizing that he never had a better audience, made the group into so bright a unit that Rosemary felt an impatient disregard for all who were not at their table. They had been two days in Paris but actually they were still under the beach umbrella. When, as at the ball of the Corps des Pages the night before, the surroundings seemed formidable to Rosemary, who had yet to attend a Mayfair party in Hollywood, Dick would bring the scene within range by greeting a few people, a sort of selection—the Divers seemed to have a large acquaintance, but it was always as if the person had not seen them for a long, long time, and was utterly bowled over, “Why, where do you keep yourselves?”—and then re-create the unity of his own party by destroying the outsiders softly but permanently with an ironic coup de grâce. Presently Rosemary seemed to have known those people herself in some deplorable past, and then got on to them, rejected them, discarded them.
Their own party was overwhelmingly American and sometimes scarcely American at all. It was themselves he gave back to them, blurred by the compromises of how many years.
Into the dark, smoky restaurant, smelling of the rich raw foods on the buffet, slid Nicole’s sky-blue suit like a stray segment of the weather outside. Seeing from their eyes how beautiful she was, she thanked them with a smile of radiant appreciation. They were all very nice people for a while, very courteous and all that. Then they grew tired of it and they were funny and bitter, and finally they made a lot of plans. They laughed at things that they would not remember clearly afterward—laughed a lot and the men drank three bottles of wine. The trio of women at the table were representative of the enormous flux of American life. Nicole was the granddaughter of a self-made American capitalist and the granddaughter of a Count of the House of Lippe Weissenfeld. Mary North was the daughter of a journeyman paper-hanger and a descendant of President Tyler. Rosemary was from the middle of the middle class, catapulted by her mother onto the uncharted heights of Hollywood. Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man’s world—they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.
So Rosemary found it a pleasant party, that luncheon, nicer in that there were only seven people, about the limit of a good party. Perhaps, too, the fact that she was new to their world acted as a sort of catalytic agent to precipitate out all their old reservations about one another. After the table broke up, a waiter directed Rosemary back into the dark hinterland of all French restaurants, where she looked up a phone number by a dim orange bulb, and called Franco-American Films. Sure, they had a print of Daddy’s Girl—it was out for the moment, but they would run it off later in the week for her at 341 Rue des Saintes Anges—ask for Mr. Crowder.
The semi-booth gave on the vestiaire and as Rosemary hung up the receiver she heard two low voices not five feet from her on the other side of a row of coats.
“—So you love me?”
“Oh, do I!”
It Was Nicole—Rosemary hesitated in the door of the booth—then she heard Dick say:
“I want you terribly—let’s go to the hotel now.” Nicole gave a little gasping sigh. For a moment the words conveyed nothing at all to Rosemary—but the tone did. The vast secretiveness of it vibrated to herself.
“I want you.”
“I’ll be at the hotel at four.”
Rosemary stood breathless as the voices moved away. She was at first even astonished—she had seen them in their relation to each other as people without personal exigencies—as something cooler. Now a strong current of emotion flowed through her, profound and unidentified. She did not know whether she was attracted or repelled, but only that she was deeply moved. It made her feel very alone as she went back into the restaurant, but it was touching to look in upon, and the passionate gratitude of Nicole’s “Oh, do I!” echoed in her mind. The particular mood of the passage she had witnessed lay ahead of her; but however far she was from it her stomach told her it was all right—she had none of the aversion she had felt in the playing of certain love scenes in pictures.
Being far away from it she nevertheless irrevocably participated in it now, and shopping with Nicole she was much more conscious of the assignation than Nicole herself. She looked at Nicole in a new way, estimating her attractions. Certainly she was the most attractive woman Rosemary had ever met—with her hardness, her devotions and loyalties, and a certain elusiveness, which Rosemary, thinking now through her mother’s middle-class mind, associated with her attitude about money. Rosemary spent money she had earned—she was here in Europe due to the fact that she had gone in the pool six times that January day with her temperature roving from 99° in the early morning to 103°, when her mother stopped it.
With Nicole’s help Rosemary bought two dresses and two hats and four pairs of shoes with her money. Nicole bought from a great list that ran two pages, and bought the things in the windows besides. Everything she liked that she couldn’t possibly use herself, she bought as a present for a friend. She bought colored beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarfs, love birds, miniatures for a doll’s house and three yards of some new cloth the color of prawns. She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a travelling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush from Hermes—bought all these things not a bit like a high-class courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional equipment and insurance—but with an entirely different point of view. Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors—these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman’s face holding his post before a spreading blaze. She illustrated very simple principles, containing in herself her own doom, but illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the procedure, and presently Rosemary would try to imitate it.